Douglas is a lakefront community named after Abraham Lincoln’s challenger for presidency, Stephen A. Douglas. Senator Douglas bought 70 acres of land, what is now 31st to 35th Street, in the 1850s, and built his home there. When he died in 1861, much of this land was donated to various institutions. The area’s population swelled with the Great Migration of the 1920s, and is now undergoing a developmental rebirth.

Longtime residents are more likely to refer to the area as Bronzeville, not Douglas, and the specific section between 26th and 35th Streets as the Gap. The name Bronzeville is a catchword, and the real estate market is growing and expanding beyond what’s traditionally known as the Gap. The development is extending south to Pershing Road, creating an area along Giles and Prairie that the locals are calling South Gap.

As it happens, Douglas is Bronzeville’s gateway. It was the site where of much of the first wave of African Americans settled in the late 1800s, as they moved north. Many of these migrants took positions in the homes of the area’s middle class, as servants. Others became Chicago’s earliest African American professionals. One of the country’s first African American surgeons, Daniel Hale Williams, founded Provident Hospital in 1891, to be among the few interracial teaching hospitals of the time.

The Center for New Horizons has worked with city officials and local residents to improve the public schools serving the area, targeting Wendell Phillips High School, the oldest black high school in the city, and Mayo Elementary School.

The neighborhood’s masonry houses, which sold for as little as $7,500 merely a generation ago, remain a good value today, while homes requiring more rehabilitation can still be found for around $100,000. A typical 2,000-square-foot townhouse that includes original wood floors and trim plus three fireplaces lists for $110,000. Rehabbed homes start at around $200,000 but have sold for as much as $350,000.